‘In Berlin, You Never Have to Stop’

In April of this past year, my bandmates and I moved from Melbourne to Berlin for three months to write an album and play our first international shows.

We’d read about prewar Berlin in Christopher Isherwood novels, seen documentaries about the Stasi, East Germany and the Wall and knew of the city’s influence on musicians like David Bowie and Nick Cave. But it wasn’t the city’s history or rock-music scene that informed our decision; rather, as our guitarist, Pat, put it, we went because Berlin is “a place where the very fringes of the arts are explored.”

The city held an appeal for a young band like ours that Paris and London haven’t had since Orwell’s days — inexpensive living and a laid-back lifestyle. Defunct warehouses to practice in; gigs played in former spy towers; inspirational conversations with resident novelists and circus performers — these were all the scenarios we discussed in excited anticipation. Berlin presented itself as the ideal place for our band to incubate its creativity, hone itself through life-altering live shows and, ultimately, to make the remarkable record we knew we were destined to make.

Initially, Berlin lived up to our romantic expectations. There were four of us — excluding overnight visitors — sharing a two-bedroom apartment in Neukölln for only 500 euros a month. Our couch transformed into a bed at night, and our stove top was used more for storage than for cooking. For the first five weeks we had no electricity, which meant no hot water and tea lights scattered in every room, daring to set stray clothes alight. The living arrangements weren’t pretty, but we didn’t mind — our rehearsal space was only a five-minute walk away, and we were surrounded by bars, parks, girls and table-tennis courts. We had arrived in a hedonist paradise, where beer was cheaper than water, drugs effortless to acquire and the best dance music in the world only a short ride away any night of the week.

In the first few weeks, we met fashion designers, photographers, illustrators, filmmakers, writers, other musicians and dozens of miscellaneous expat misfits who escaped to Berlin for a clean artistic slate. On encountering an El Salvador-born, Los Angeles-raised filmmaker named Nehemias at a park gathering, I was curious to know his personal motivations for moving to Berlin. He told me about the inexplicable energy he felt when he visited the previous year on vacation. Still in awe of the city myself, I asked if there were any drawbacks to living as a creative in Berlin. “In L.A., people actually get stuff done because you’ll go homeless if you don’t hustle. Here you can be superpoor for years and still live comfortably.”

Still, it seemed that everyone we met was creative-minded and drawn to Berlin for the same reasons we were: to pursue their art. Except that very few of them seemed to have any coming exhibitions or book launches or gigs. “I spent a lot of time talking about the arts over beer or coffee, or at 4 a.m. over a mirror,” Pat ruminated recently, “but I didn’t see a whole lot actually being created.” I found it difficult to disagree with him.

In 2003, Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, described the city as “poor but sexy.” In just under 10 years, little has changed. The city’s widespread unemployment was evident in Neukölln, the gentrifying borough we were living in. This “sexiness,” perhaps a symptom of the city’s being poor, made it attractive to artists from all over the world; the postindustrial city seems designed for artists to live inexpensively and make their art.

But is Berlin still a creative mecca if no one who makes the pilgrimage actually produces anything? Were there, we started to wonder, two different types of “creatives” in the city — those who made a genuine living as established artists and those who, like us, were there merely as “creative tourists”? Because it quickly became apparent that there were many who’d come to Berlin for its low-cost living but who weren’t actually, in the words of Nehemias, managing to “get stuff done.”

For us, it wasn’t for lack of inspiration that we weren’t producing music, but rather the number of distractions on offer. There is much for an artist to be inspired by in Berlin. The city has more bridges than Venice; countless museums and galleries; a healthy scattering of abandoned buildings and defunct amusement parks; and innumerable monuments and memorials steeped in history and emotion. For those seeking inspiration from people or characters, Berlin is where the “weird” are more normal than the normal; parents clutch jumbo-size beers while their children throw themselves at swings; nudists inhabit public parks; and ex-Stasi informants occupy stools at their local kneipe and mumble over drinks.

All around us, cafes were teeming, the canal banks were lined with people reading, talking and laughing, and the vast parks were brimming with blankets and smoke and sunshine. But no one seemed to be working.

I started to feel somewhat cheated; things were too easy. The everyday stresses to which we were accustomed were now nonexistent. Every night there was a new adventure to take their place: parties in empty public swimming pools, raves at abandoned airports, nightclubs that stayed open for days. There were no deadlines to worry about or bosses to enforce them. There were too few limitations, and we’d lost all motivation and willpower to ever say no.

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Soon our self-imposed five-day-a-week rehearsal routine started to crumble in the face of hangovers, comedowns and various members going AWOL. Sessions started being skipped, shortened or halved. We set a midday start time for rehearsals but, on many days, one of us hadn’t even been to bed by then. We were beginning to forget our reasons for having left Australia. The inexplicable energy of the city had taken us in, but instead of stimulating our music, it had only fueled our partying. We lost our “hustle.” And things disintegrated from there.

A member of our band was incarcerated for 17 hours, receiving a 1,600-euro fine for damage to private property. There were fights and drunken backgammon sessions resulting in heads breaking windows. There were infected arms, cut legs. We were the victims of credit-card fraud, theft and immoral drug dealers.

One day, while taking a break from staring at a nudist at the Hasenheide, I realized that I’d ended up in a kind of artist’s paradox: We had gone to Berlin because of the lifestyle it offered to artists, yet we were coming unstuck by that exact lifestyle. Berlin was ruining us. Soon I started to consider the unthinkable: returning home early to Melbourne, to structure and a sound state of mind, to my girlfriend, my family and my job.

First, though, I did a bit of research. And I discovered that, in 2010, so-called creative industries accounted for 20 percent of Berlin’s G.D.P. — meaning that there were people in the city producing art. So how had they avoided being stymied by the temptations of the creative mecca? Perhaps, I began to think, it was because Berlin wasn’t a creative mecca for these artists; it was simply home. We were the interlopers, making a pilgrimage and getting lost in the party, while they were busy working in their studios. Perhaps to these artists, we were no better than all the other tourists who came, wringing the city of what they needed for a few days, weeks or months, getting drunk, then going home. While we were in Berlin, we noticed a growing animosity toward the so-called “EasyJet set” — tourists taking advantage of cheap international flights to join in Berlin’s party scene. Was this why I never met an artist who had a coming exhibition or showing or play? Because they didn’t leave their studios for every party? Because maybe they didn’t want to go out and meet the likes of me?

Now, though, even the established artists living in Berlin are being pushed out. On Sept. 4, the notorious Kunsthaus Tacheles — built as a department store, abandoned and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, taken over by expat and local artists — was shut down by HSH Nordbank, with plans to sell it.

I passed Tacheles one day in June, and on the facade, hanging between a statue of a penguin and a gorilla, was a sign asking the question “Where will we go now?” Every day, rents are increasing and boroughs once dominated by artists are being gentrified. Will the artists contributing to Berlin’s economy be forced out? Will the increases in rent and the cost of living force the creative tourists to “hustle” more, and “get stuff done”? Or will they just move on to the next city where beer is cheaper than bottled water and a two-bedroom apartment costs peanuts to rent?

I won’t find out — because I have returned to Australia. I have a new perspective: I’ve quit smoking, signed a lease with my girlfriend and started looking for dogs to adopt. I realize now that creativity is less about living a hedonistic lifestyle on a pittance and more about actually creating things. Berlin provided us with every opportunity to write our album, but six months later, there were still no recordings. The success stories of Bowie and Nick Cave are the ones that we heard, because the stories of everyone else, like ours, aren’t worth telling.

As for our band, it’s on a hiatus, but I’m unsure if it will ever reform. Tommy, our drummer, is somewhere in the English countryside learning to build guitars. Pat has moved home to manage a bar in rural Australia and is thinking about a university degree. And Sam, our bassist, is working not 50 feet away from my desk, strategizing for global beer and chocolate brands. We have beers with Tommy over Skype, and Pat comes to town when he can. But even if we do get the band back together, outstanding fines will prevent us from returning to Germany. Sadly, future gigs in the basement of Berliner record stores are not in the cards.

It would be ridiculous to blame a city for lack of creative output. But in a crooked and ironic way, Pat summed it up best: “In Berlin, you never have to stop.” In the end, the city’s lifestyle, with all its distractions, outweighed our aspirations and our will to succeed. Three months in the creative mecca taught me an important lesson about creativity: It’s not something you will find in a place.

But the trip wasn’t a total loss. I learned how to roll a joint properly, cut hair, drink whiskey straight without gagging. And of course, I came back with the start of a novel: 13,000 unpublishable words about an Australian musician who went to Berlin, took too many drugs, had a psychotic episode and ended up in a German mental hospital. That last part is fiction, thankfully — what I imagine might have happened if I hadn’t managed to escape my artistic paradise.

A version of this article appears in print on November 25, 2012, on Page MM52 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘In Berlin, You Never Have to Stop’. Today's Paper|Subscribe